Dan Schulman
PayPal is off to an excellent start for the 
We delivered 17%* revenue growth in the first quarter, which is a strong foundation to build on as we move into 2015. We continue our steady growth in customer accounts, increasing total active accounts by 3.6 million to 165 million customers across the globe. We expect strong growth to continue in 2015, as we further penetrate the merchant population and build out our products and services to grow more and more relevant to consumers.
Our customer engagement also steadily increased, with transactions per account growing to 23 in Q1 from 21 in the first quarter of 2014. We processed more than 1 billion transactions in the first quarter. This represents an increase of 24% year over year and importantly our monetization per account accelerated sequentially to $49. We also continue to see an increase in mobile payments transactions, now reaching nearly 30% of our overall transactions, with mobile payments transactions growing over 40% year over year.
We continued to improve our penetration of the top online merchants, reaching 74% of the IR100 merchants in the U.S. Braintree maintained its strong triple-digit growth in the first quarter, and signed some great new accounts.
We are currently in one of the most exciting periods in the history of financial services. Today PayPal operates in two fast-growing parts of the digital payments industry – online and mobile – but the online and offline payments worlds are digitizing and converging through mobile experiences. As a result, I believe our addressable market is not just the $2.5 trillion associated with online and mobile, but more like the $25 trillion associated with commerce both online and offline. PayPal has a powerful set of assets, and you can be sure we are not standing still. We are well positioned to take advantage of the changes sweeping through our industry.
To capitalize on this opportunity, PayPal is in the midst of a massive transformation, completely rebuilding our technology platform, enabling greater scale, faster production cycles, and closer collaboration between teams so we can continuously deliver better products to our customers. PayPal now has one of the largest hybrid clouds in the world, and we have transformed our core business capabilities into robust service-based platforms. PayPal’s newly modernized technology platform is becoming a strategic asset.
In revamping our technology and processes, we are dramatically reducing our product development cycles; allowing us to deploy software releases in weeks versus months. Everything we have done in the first six months of my tenure is positioning PayPal to take advantage of what I see as one of the greatest opportunities for growth that the payments industry has ever seen.
We have a lot to execute on, but we now have the right organizational structure, leadership team, and operational discipline to get it done. I am excited about where we are, what we are building, and about PayPal’s strong position and potential in this dynamic market.
We have an extraordinary opportunity to redefine the financial lives of millions even billions of people, and by doing so, to truly improve their lives. We are very focused on making this happen and I extend my gratitude to PayPal’s global employee base, customers, merchant partners and developers who are all contributing to our success.
*Calculated on an FX-neutral basis